A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not more distasteful to the electors of Bristol than a small instalment of toleration to Roman Catholics in England.  A measure was passed (1778) repealing certain iniquitous penalties created by an Act of William the Third.  It is needless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice and sense was supported by Burke.  His voters began to believe that those were right who had said that he had been bred at Saint Omer’s, was a Papist at heart, and a Jesuit in disguise.  When the time came, summa dies et ineluctabile fatum, Burke bore with dignity and temper his dismissal from the only independent constituency that he ever represented.  Years before he had warned a young man entering public life to regard and wish well to the common people, whom his best instincts and his highest duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little trust in them as in princes.  Burke somewhere describes an honest public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict against the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than passions and prejudices of our own.

The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol, saw this conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances.  They were the years of the civil war between the English at home and the English in the American colonies.  George III. and Lord North have been made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively, their own.  They were only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the entire community.  Burke discloses in many places, that for once the king and Parliament did not act without the sympathies of the mass.  In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, he was rebuking the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for the support of the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code.  “It is but too true,” he said in a passage worth remembering, “that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare.  It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence.  They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy.  The desire of having some one below them, descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a gaol.  This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men, in very humble life, have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our colonies; our dependents.  This lust of party power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Siren song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have thought were never organised to that sort of music.”